You didn’t think I could hear about new Phildars without talking about them, did you? Especially since some of the catalogues are now also 50% off?!

These are my favourites. I’m not sure I would make the tunic on the top left as long as it is, though. Wearing it without pants, sure, that could work. But with a long dress over a pair of pants, you’re going to have some belt loop outlines. Which may be sexy to belt-loop fetishists, but I’ll stick to a tunic length, thank you.

I finished 9 projects this year. Not the most amazing turnout, but I learned quite a lot. I think my New Year’s Resolution for this year will be to finish at least one project every month. I have three sweaters that are close to completion, so those will be the first to go.

In terms of mags, my favourite has been Phildar, but the most lusty patterns have once again been 2006 patterns. My Touch of Grey sweater and Colchique are both Phildar patterns from about a year ago. I love them, and I can’t wait to finish them and wear them.

Best pattern overall is a toughie, and I’ll set it as a tie between two. The queen of cable patterns this year has been Tikru, who not only put out these beautiful Chevalier Mittens but also this Green Gable Sweater. They’re my favourites of this year.

You can imagine what this post is about. I bit the bullet and bought myself some Malabrigo. It is soft, and wonderful, and will become a neckwarmer on the bus to Kingston on Sunday as a celebration of finishing my last paper of the year.

Oh my goodness, I can’t get over how soft it is. I’m so glad I live near Romni Wools! On the way back I kept looking into the bag and touching it. The Beau spent a lot of that trip rolling his eyes.

I don’t know about you folks, but up here in Canada it’s gettin’ mighty cool. Not cold yet, but fall is certainly making its presence known. Which is the perfect time, in my opinion, to begin thinking about mittens. So here are a few mitten photos I found on Flickr. What’s your favourite mitten pattern?

I’m moving to Toronto in a few days, but The Beau will be remaining in Kingston. Seeing as I’ll be carrying on a long-distance relationship for the next year, I’ve got lots of travel time to kill in the car (three hours to Kingston, three hours back, every month or so). Because I can’t knit while driving, I’ve decided to learn a language by buying tapes and playing them in the car. I’m obsessed with Japan so I’m thinking of learning Japanese, but I’ve recently been leaning towards Finnish as well. I tend to like learning the really weird languages (Esperanto, Klingon) so Finnish would be a weird language that I could learn and actually get some use from learning it.

From reading Finnish knitting blogs, I’ve learned some words like “lanka” (thread/yarn), “pieni” (little), and “neulo” (knitting). While this isn’t the greatest start, I have also done a few flash card sessions with parts of the body and such. I’ve still yet to decide if I will devote my trips to Japanese or Finnish, but Finnish has a more familiar alphabet and it would certainly aid me in piecing together posts like this. You see, I went crazy for the swatch underneath the “Pieni lankakauppa” book (which I now know means “little yarn shop,” the Finnish title for The Friday Night Knitting Club). While I could have easily read it if I knew how to speak Finnish, I had to instead resort to searching through other posts for similar pictures and hope there was an obvious link. Fortunately, there was a previous post called Pewter coat puikoilla**, with a link to a mysterious magazine called Interweave knits talvi 2006 lehdestÃ¤. Very Mysterious. Does anyone know what “Interweave knits” means in English?

All joking aside, it turns out that I have that magazine! So I therefore have the stitch pattern. While I’m not exactly inspired by the project itself, I might like to use the stitch pattern in a sweater sometime. A very basic fitted turtleneck would be nice. What do y’all think?

Now that my shawl is finished (tune in for an FO post), I’m “designing” a sweater. I’ve got a bunch of alpaca left over from my dad’s Rule 30 scarf, so I’m knitting a sweater with it. It’ll be entirely stockinette, very loose, very casual, and I’ll be knitting it at camp. Because I don’t know anything about sweaters, I’m taking the basic measurements from the Phildar 443 Tendances sweater from the navy section (cleverly titled 9 and 15) and making modifications if necessary. I have three grey shades of alpaca and a red splash for interest. Here’s how I’m figuring out how I’ll break up the stripes:

Charcoal grey: 87.5 g or 37% of the total mass
Dark grey: 87.5 g or 37% of the total mass
Light grey: 37.5 g or 16% of the total mass
Red: 25 g or 11% of the total mass
Total: 237.5 g

While I love integral calculus, I’d rather not have to do it at the moment so I’m removing the waist shaping for my area approximations:

Because I can’t go a day without writing a script while I could have been knitting, I wrote a little thing that takes the proportions of colours I have in the stash and my shirt measurements and picks out some possible stripe combinations. I’ve got 8 possibilities here; which do you think I should choose? I’m leaning towards number 8 or number 2, 4, or 7. Or one of the others.

The red stripe goes right above the boob. I’m also considering just putting some red on the cuffs and bottom as accents instead of a boob stripe. What do you think?

This poll isn’t going the way I wanted. Sigh. I’d like to knit the Shetland Triangle but triangle shawls don’t work when you’re running around and playing croquet and badminton and don’t want to tie it up into horrible bunches. I’d rather a long rectangular shawl, but it seems like you folks disagree with me. It makes sense; the Shetland Triangle is so tempting. In the hopes that beginning-of-the-weekers are of a different mind and to accumulate more than a paltry 14 votes, I’m opening up this vote for another few days. Remember, I have two weeks! I’m not even sure what yarn to use.

If you’ve knit any of these before, leave a comment and let me know how long it took you. Think I can knit it in two weeks?

UPDATE, an hour later…

OH, SCREW IT! I love you guys. I really do. I spend the whole weekend at the cottage working out a pattern for a lace parasol but then I come back and I see the tally and it’s 6 for Shetland Triangle, 1 for parasol. And I try to convince myself that the parasol is a good idea but the Shetland Triangle, oh the Shetland Triangle. So then I’m musing over it and trying to stick with the parasol and then I come across this post again after having bookmarked it because I didn’t have time to read it on Friday and I realize that it was knit for the same reason as mine; that the Shetland Triangle has a wonderful stitch pattern but she doesn’t want a triangular shawl. And she knit it on an insane deadline! It’s serendipity-do, it surely is. I am going to knit a Stashmina. And you guys knew I was going to knit a Stashmina, you just had to let me figure that out myself. You guys are so smart!

Let the record show that Eve is in a panic. She has 1.5 repeats finished on the SWATCH for the Myrtle shawl, and she has to finish the actual shawl itself in two (2) weeks if she wants to wear it to the garden party. This is so not happening. A shawl with lace in every row is never a good idea for a deadline, and she has decided to scrap it in favour of a faster project. To this end, she has prepared a poll and is requesting your opinion as to the best project to knit: Shetland Triangle, Japanese Feather Stole, Lace Dream Stole, a lace parasol based on Victoria, or Orangina. Results will be tabulated at the end of the weekend.